EXCELLENT Post from Pepperdine’s’ Jeff Baker over on Clinical Law Prof Blog on their proactive approach to the California proposal! Congratulations Pepperdine!

Pepperdine adopted these standards as graduation requirements beginning with the Class of 2017, “in advance of the rules’ formal enactment, to ensure that our students and our school are prepared and to accomplish these objectives well and eagerly. We are actively building capacity in our program of clinical education, adding clinics, creating practicums, developing new experiential opportunities across every law school center, examining our curriculum, and building a flexible, compliant program to generate pro bono opportunities for students. The new rules have given us great incentive to innovate and adapt, with a renewed focus on professional formation, and to live into our own mission.”

Jeff also mentioned that he spoke at a panel last year at Pepperdine’s Judicial Clerkship Institute” where there was “much discussion about experiences students should seek and receive to prepare for elite practices and judicial clerkships,” The consensus from judges, bar leaders and academics at that conference?

students need more courses and experiences that will generate wisdom, creativity, humility, integrity, diligence and excellence, within a pervasive understanding of lawyers’ roles and obligations to society.

Justice Jon Streeter, formerly president of the California Bar and chair of TFARR “expressed confidence and optimism that the rules will be adopted.”

It sounds like California will do the right thing in changing times when human nature resists change…

One Response

When I was a partner in an Atlanta law firm, it always frustrated me to receive resumes from law students who did not know how to do anything related to the real practice of law. In those days, the law teaching profession resisted the practicing bar’s attempts to force law schools to offer more skills courses. The law teaching profession rigorously defended its position on theory only courses, and law professors demanded the legal profession train the graduating law students how to be real lawyers. Endeavoring to strike a balance between the two positions, the MacCrate Report to the ABA recommended law schools offer lawyering skills courses such as negotiation and mediation, as well as clinics and externships. Pepperdine was in the first wave of law schools that embraced the concept of offering numerous skills courses, multiple clinics and externships.

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